Protection from Evil

I mostly sulked at home for a while: no board game nights, no D&D, no hanging out with Tia. And then I had my appendix removed, and gained a new scar in the same spot as the one in the virginity video. I showed my doctor a zoomed-in picture from the video and asked how long it would be before my scar looked like that. She said four to six weeks.

The gang at Deck ‘n Bones were about to start a new D&D campaign, so I decided to try to rejoin them. I was doing well for a while, but then the Dungeon Master introduced an oracle into the story and I lost it. I threw books, punched walls, and screamed like a harpy.

Everyone in the group was staring at me, wondering why I had gone postal. “They might have some ideas,” Corey suggested softly with a shrug.

Corey and I explained the whole weird humiliating situation. They stayed mostly silent, but Lisa and Jim tried to argue when I got to the part about Harry’s death being my fault.

Griff was a fifty year old gruff guy with a red beard. He stayed silent, but when we were done he somehow drew everyone’s attention. “Okay, first of all, you’re full of shit. Secondly, Harry’s death wasn’t your fault ... because you’re full of shit. Thirdly, if you weren’t full of shit, you’d be doing it all wrong.”

He stood up, paused to make sure he still had everyone’s attention, and went on: “In all of the stories, the hero always tries to ignore fate, and it doesn’t work. Or they try to defy fate, and it doesn’t work. These themes are classic: look at Oedipus Rex. The only way to win in a prophetic story is to trick fate.”

“How do you do that?” Corey asked.

“Okay, you claim - you’re full of shit, but you claim,” Griff lectured, “that everything you’ve seen in these videos has happened exactly. So what’s in the videos is constant - it can’t be changed. But everything else is a variable that potentially you can control. Set them up - stage them. Make them happen the way you want, within the bounds of the premonition.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Ansal joined it. “It’s like in Back to the Future, where Marty sees Doc Brown get shot, but what he doesn’t see is that Doc Brown is wearing a bulletproof vest!”

Griff rolled his eyes. “Back to the Future is overrated Hollywood drivel with insultingly bad time travel mechanics. If you want to see a mainstream movie that gets it all right, watch...”

Ansal cut him off: “ ... Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Yeah, we’ve heard your rant before, Griff. But, the bulletproof vest is what you’re talking about, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Griff reluctantly admitted.

“So, maybe it’s not this TB guy?” Lisa speculated. “Maybe it’s his nicer twin brother?”

“With the same tattoo?” Ansal politely challenged.

“Maybe you’re not really a virgin when it happens,” Jim suggested. “Maybe you use theater blood packs or something.”

Lisa shook her head. “But then she’d still have to sleep with TB. That doesn’t solve anything.”

My head was spinning. My heart was thumping. My body was high on adrenaline for some reason. I wanted very badly to be somewhere else. I stood up. “I’m sorry. I’m just really not feeling like this right now. Thank you,” I told them. Corey rode with me silently to my house and then went on his way.

At school the next day during lunch, Corey was acting super cautious. “So I’ve been doing some research. About your videos,” he told me. “And I’d like to tell you what I’ve found. But only if you’re ready to talk about it.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I said with a frown.

“I think the anal sex on the couch is supposed to be with me,” he blurted.

“Corey...!” I couldn’t believe that he was adding this to my problems.

He pushed on: “I think we set it up, like Griff said. Like a test.” He waited a moment but I had nothing to say to him. “Think about it. You’ve got those markings on your butt: mace and bow - cleric and ranger, like our new D&D characters. And you’re reading The Hobbit. I’m the one who turned you on to that, way back in grade school.”

“It’s not exactly obscure in our circle, Corey,” I argued with a sigh.

“But..., why a paper copy instead of digital? I bet it’s so that we could see the cover in the video. And it’s in your house in the middle of the day,” he continued. “If it’s this time of year than it’s gotta be around noon, so either a Saturday, or we ditch class for it. And there’s the thing about wearing clothes you would never wear. Doesn’t it all seem staged?”

I felt a headache coming on. “Corey, I really don’t need this right now.” I took a deep breath. “If all that’s true, if we did it to send ourselves a message, why wouldn’t I just say your name?”

“Well, I mean,” he stammered. “That’s like one of Griff’s rules. You can’t say my name because you don’t say my name. Look, Mal, I know you don’t think of me as boyfriend material or whatever, and I guess sometimes I have creeped on you a little, but I’m your ally in this. Either it’s me and we put all those clues there as a test or lesson, or it’s some guy you don’t know, and none of those things make any sense.”

I did badly on my chemistry test after lunch. My mind was consumed with finding some other explanation than the one Corey had proposed.

That evening I admitted to Corey that he was probably right. We both studied the video, separately, trying to learn every detail.

“Your dick is actually that big?” I asked when we compared notes.

“Yeah,” he answered standoffishly. I don’t know why, but I’d just always assumed that Corey had a small dick. “You’re going to need to practice,” he told me. “Work your way up until you can handle something as big as a dick.”

“That won’t be a problem,” I told him. “Harry and I were doing anal for half the summer.” He frowned jealously.